NATIONAL VIDEO

Turn clocks back Sunday

Daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. Sunday, and local governments say they are ready for the time change.

The time will fall back an hour in the middle of the night, but not everyone will be asleep when it happens.

Emergency workers who will be working overnight Sunday will be prepared to be on the lookout when 1 a.m. happens twice.

"When we’re giving out times of calls to the med units for reporting purposes, it could be a little confusing when you fall back an hour and you’re given a time that has previously already been," said Marty Nix, director of Hall County’s 911 Center.

He said due to the time change, people end up with a longer shift as well.

"If you are working that shift, that is an extra hour you have to work," Nix said.

The 911 center is programmed so that the time will change automatically when daylight saving time ends.

"There’s no manual intervention that we have to do," Nix said. "It’s a clock that basically syncs up all of our equipment and all of our software so that everything is talking exactly at the same time."

He said it’s important that all everything is time stamped.

"You don’t want one thing saying 2 o’clock and then our recorder saying it’s 3 o’clock. Because if we go back trying to find a call, it’s going to be an hour off. It’s just little things like that," Nix said.

Jim Hamblen, superintendent of public lands and building for the city of Gainesville, said though he still has to make sure things are prepared for the time change, computer systems take care of themselves.

"We don’t have to do as much as we did, say, 20 years ago," Hamblen said. "The only thing we’ll have to do Monday is adjust I think four time clocks, which are the old mechanical type, and they control indoor and outdoor lighting around the joint administration building."

Hamblen said the timers are important because they control what time the lights come on in the morning.

He said older computer systems also need to be manually reset because they are programmed to switch times on the wrong day.

Daylight saving time has ended the first Sunday in November since 2007. It previously ended the last Sunday in October.

Some of the city’s air conditioning is controlled by a computer system that is about 5 years old, Hamblen said, and it’s programmed to reset too early.

"It’s kind of like a Y2K thing," Hamblen said. "The computers are all set up for what’s been the law for 20 plus years, and now they changed it on us."